The Queen’s Gambit’s protagonist, Beth Harmon, is largely self-sufficient, particularly as she becomes one of the strongest players in competitive chess due to her immense talent. However, she also has key friends and mentors along the way, including Mr. Shaibel, the man who teaches her how to play chess; Jolene, an older girl who looks after her at Methuen orphanage; and Benny Watts and Harry Beltik, two other high-ranked chess players who help tutor her. Sometimes Beth pushes those who care about her away, which makes her chess career and personal life suffer. But by the end, their friendship proves crucial: Jolene helps Beth overcome her addiction and build up the physical and mental stamina to make sure she can compete in tournaments, while Benny helps shore up her confidence when navigating a match against her most formidable chess opponent, Vasily Borgov. Because Beth can only triumph against Borgov with the help of her friends, the book illustrates that everyone—even the most successful or talented people—need support to achieve their goals.
Growing up in the Methuen orphanage, Beth is only able to foster her innate talents with the help of key mentors and friends like Mr. Shaibel and Jolene. Mr. Shaibel, the orphanage janitor, is initially hesitant to teach Beth how to play chess when she notices him playing in the basement. But once he realizes her talent for the game, he gives her a lot of encouragement. He provides her a book on chess openings, spends hours playing with her, and even invites a man who teaches a local high school chess club, Mr. Ganz, for Beth to meet and grow her talents even further. Without Mr. Shaibel, Beth would likely not have discovered her talent for chess in the first place. Jolene, an older girl at Methuen, also proves to be a crucial mentor and friend. She becomes Beth’s confidante, and Jolene teaches Beth about rites of passage like menstruation and helps her with her burgeoning addiction to tranquilizers. In gym class, when Beth hurts her hand playing volleyball, Jolene teaches Beth how to hold her hands properly and tells her to work on her skills so that Beth isn’t afraid of the ball anymore. Beth carries this lesson throughout her life: that the more she works on something, the better she gets, and the less afraid she becomes. These lessons help Beth become both a successful chess player and a confident woman later in life.
Beth’s relationships with Benny Watts and Harry Beltik—two chess players whose mentorship she values but whom she also pushes away—emphasize further that even with Beth’s talent, she needs support from friends and mentors. Beltik and Benny each spend weeks with Beth, helping her prepare for her tournaments in Paris and Moscow. With their help, she feels exceptionally improved, playing what she feels is her “best chess”—again emphasizing that despite her talent, Beth still needs help and coaching to reach her potential. However, Beth gradually forgets this. After Beth consistently beats both of them in chess, she feels that each of them has “little left to teach her.” And after suffering a devastating loss in Paris against Vasily Borgov, she pushes Benny away when he tries to resume their training. Without friends around to support her, she quickly falls into a dangerous pattern of getting drunk every day, and she loses to a far inferior player at the Kentucky State Championship. This demonstrates that even if Beth is more talented and successful than Benny or Beltik, she still needs her friends’ support in other ways to be successful.
Beth’s crowning victory against Borgov in Moscow only comes with the help of her friends, illustrating that even with her talent, Beth needs people by her side to achieve her highest goals. At the end of the book, Jolene returns to help support Beth and recover from her addiction following her loss in Paris. She also helps Beth build mental and physical stamina to be able to play in the tournaments. At the next tournament in Moscow, Beth gratefully recalls how she had worked out with Jolene for five months in Lexington to build up stamina. Even though Jolene can’t necessarily help Beth with her chess playing, her support is still incredibly valuable to Beth’s success in chess. Benny’s support is equally crucial to Beth when beating Borgov. Over the tournament, she wishes that she had other chess players with whom to review her games, particularly after she sees Borgov strategizing with other Russian players about a game that he had adjourned. When Beth has a night to contemplate a game that she is playing with Borgov, she is grateful when Benny calls her the next morning, having gathered a team of players to talk through potential strategies. Even though she thought he had nothing more to help her with, this episode proves how important his support is. Knowing that she has people who are there supporting her calms Beth’s nerves and helps her have the confidence to beat Borgov. At each stage of Beth’s life and chess career, it is clear how crucial friendship and mentorship are to her success.
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Friendship and Mentorship Quotes in The Queen’s Gambit
Beth tried it, awkwardly at first. Jolene showed her again, laughing. Beth tried a few more times and did it better. Then Jolene got the ball and had Beth catch it with her fingertips. After a few times it got to be easy.
“You work on that now, hear?” Jolene said and ran off to the shower.
Beth worked on it over the next week, and after that she did not mind volleyball at all. She did not become good at it, but it wasn’t something she was afraid of anymore.
Mrs. Deardorff kept her waiting almost an hour. Beth didn’t care. She read in National Geographic about a tribe of Indians who lived in the holes of cliffs. Brown people with black hair and bad teeth. In the pictures there were children everywhere, often snuggled up against the older people. It was all strange; she had never been touched very much by older people, except for punishment. She did not let herself think about Mrs. Deardorff’s razor strop. If Deardorff was going to use it, she could take it. Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was of a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.
Some of them were books she had seen before; a few of them she owned. But most were new to her, heavy-looking and depressing to see. She knew there were a great many things she needed to know. But Capablanca had almost never studied, had played on intuition and his natural gifts, while inferior players like Bogolubov and Grünfeld memorized lines of play like German pedants. She had seen players at tournament after their games had ended, sitting motionless in uncomfortable chairs oblivious to the world, studying opening variations or middle-game strategy or endgame theory. It was endless. Seeing Beltik methodically removing one heavy book after another, she felt weary and disoriented. She glanced over at the TV: a part of her wanted to turn it on and forget chess forever.
“Do you want to play another?”
Benny shrugged and turned away. “Save it for Borgov.” But she could see he would have played her if he had thought he could win. She felt a whole lot better.
They continued as lovers and did not play any more games, except from the books. He went out a few days later for another poker game and came back with two hundred in winnings and they had one of their best times in bed together, with the money beside them on the night table. She was fond of him, but that was all. And by the last week before Paris, she was beginning to feel that he had little left to teach her.
She sat at the board and wished for a moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess. Most people did.
Beth thought about it. There were bottles of red wine and white in the cabinet behind her, and for a moment she became impatient for Jolene to leave so that she could get one out and twist the cork off and pour herself a full glass. She could feel the sensation of it at the back of her throat.
[…]
“You’ve got to get your ass moving, girl,” Jolene said. “You got to quit sitting in your own funk.”
“Okay,” Beth said. “I’ll be there.”
When Jolene left, Beth had one glass of wine but not a second. She opened up all the windows in the house and drank the wine out in the backyard, with the moon, nearly full, directly above the little shed at the back. There was a cool breeze. She took a long time over the drink, letting the breeze blow into the kitchen window, fluttering the curtains, blowing through the kitchen and living room, clearing out the air inside.
No matter how often she told herself she was as good as any of them, she felt with dismay that those men with their heavy black shoes knew something she did not know and never would know. She tried to concentrate on her own career, her quick rise to the top of American chess and beyond it, the way she had become a more powerful player than Benny Watts, the way she had beaten Laev without a moment of doubt in her moves, the way that, even as a child, she had found an error in the play of the great Morphy. But all of it was meaningless and trivial beside her glimpse into the establishment of Russian chess, into the room where the men conferred in deep voices and studied the board with an assurance that seemed wholly beyond her.
They went on together, exploring possibilities, following out line after line, for almost an hour. Benny was amazing. He had worked out everything; she began to see ways of crowding Borgov, finessing Borgov, deceiving him, tying up his pieces, forcing him to compromise and retreat.
Finally she looked at her watch and said, “Benny, it’s nine-fifteen here.”
“Okay,” he said. “Go beat him.”
The applause began. She took the black king in her hand and turned to face the auditorium, letting the whole massive weight of the ovation wash over her. People in the audience were standing, applauding louder and louder. She received it with her whole body, feeling her cheeks redden with it and then go hot and wet as the thunderous sound washed away thought.
And then Vasily Borgov was standing beside her, and a moment later to her complete astonishment he had his arms spread and then was embracing her, hugging her to him warmly.
